


i love you without knowing how

by Lacquiparle



Series: we love or we do not love each other [2]
Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Coming of Age, F/F, F/M, Falling In Love, Magical Realism, Speculative fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27665105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacquiparle/pseuds/Lacquiparle
Summary: "There are lone cemeteries,tombs filled with mute bones,the heart going through a tunnel,shadowy, shadowy, shadowy:we die as if a ship were going down inside us,like a drowning in the heart,like falling endlessly from the skin to the soul."from "Only Death" by Pablo Neruda
Relationships: Alec Hardy/Ellie Miller, Beth Latimer/Ellie Miller, Ellie Miller & Joe Miller (Broadchurch)
Series: we love or we do not love each other [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022854
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	i love you without knowing how

**Author's Note:**

> I accidentally wrote "coming of algae" instead of "coming of age," so don't take anything I write too seriously.

There are certain things that seem just out of reach.

When she was young and moss-covered pillars ornamented the estuary by her parents’ home, she rested under grey skies. The meadow held her still. Her thoughts amassed into patterns, swathed in embellishment.

Her grandfather would die soon after, hoarded under a current at sea.

At the wake, dressed in bleak black, she set eyes upon his embalmed body and felt the rippling current course through her. Touching the brim of the casket, her father’s hand pressed upon her shoulder, she gazed down upon her grandfather’s phantom face. 

What happens after we die? She asked the parish priest. An ordinary inquisition from a child who earns to understand and make sense of a chaotic world. 

If we are good, we go to heaven. 

What if we are not good? 

Damnation. 

&

The lord works in mysterious ways, and damnation doesn’t seem too earnest a path for a girl of seventeen. Before the world can call upon her to account for her many sins, before the world can expose her wounds. 

Before she met Joe, she kissed boys in car backseats and in the tide of the sea. She held the hand of one while promising her love to another. She flirted and flitted, an unreserved soul finding her place among many. 

Her knees scoured across stone, across metal, and gathered the remains of scrapes and scratches and scars. Remnants of childhood. 

She laughed and sobbed and slammed her bedroom door in her parents’ faces, ruminating on all their faults and how desperately she hated them. Those fools. Those arseholes. 

No one understands the pain of a teenage girl just on the threshold of womanhood with boys clawing at her heels and the trauma of burgeoning adult beckoning her with sweets and goodies. 

Long before she met Joe, Ellie asked Beth to spend the night. They reckoned themselves rebellious, sneaking fags after school and ditching a class or two. Beth with her frizzy hair and high-top trainers, and her boyfriend Mark. Beth who was good at track and popped her chewing gum a little too loudly.

They were under the duvet in Ellie’s bed that paltry summer night. Those wistful summer nights scented with childhood. 

What’s it like. Ellie wanted to know about _it_ ever since Beth told Ellie that she had slept with Mark. Words like it and that, colloquialisms that skirted around the very thing that both girls feared out of repression but seemed to desire out of earnest curiosity. 

It hurt. 

I heard it’s supposed to feel good.

Beth didn’t respond immediately, both girls staring awkwardly at one another for a moment, the duvet a shield against marauders. 

His thing was big. I don’t think we did it right.

His thing? 

Beth nodded. 

What did it look like? 

Beth blushed. I didn’t look. I was too nervous.

I saw Robert’s willy once, when we were all swimming. It was tiny. 

I think it shrinks when it gets wet. 

You know you can’t get pregnant when you’re in water.

Everyone knows that, Beth. She poked her friend’s nose coyly, playfully, and the girls laughed. All this talk of willies and fannies and shagging erupted in stifled giggling until Beth leaned over and pressed her lips against Ellie’s. 

Silence suffocated the room. 

I’ve always wanted to do that. Beth whispered. 

Ellie’s eyes shone in the dark, miniscule flecks of gold around her irises burning through the obscurity. 

Beth leaned forward again, and all Ellie could think about was moss covering stone and her grandfather’s ash sunken cheeks. Her childhood escaping her grasp. 

&

After Fred’s christening, Ellie seldom entered the parish church. She and Joe didn’t feel the need to indoctrinate their children, and unless it was a holiday or unique occasion, they rarely set foot upon sacred soil. 

She knew she desired her children more than Joe, the lopsided demand carving a laceration between them that refused to heal. 

Their relationship, an evolution from lust and desire, plans and dreams, to an unintended pregnancy that resulted in back peddling to the altar. 

In an argument—never heated, she told Alec, many years later—she informed Joe that she didn’t want him to marry her for the baby. To be sacramentally yoked together forever due to imprudence. 

Joe laughed. He laughed and ran his broad hands over her hips and told her he loved her. 

She wondered if he ever took those oaths seriously, or if the children she bore were purely happy accidents. Pure negligence on their part due to the moment. 

For years, she wondered. 

&

The clock on the wall struck midnight, chiming an undercurrent to the house’s soft melodies. The refrigerator’s soft hum. The heater whirling a cadence. The house’s distinct breath as she settled herself for the night. 

The boys slept in their respective bedrooms, and Ellie sat on her sofa, attempting to breathe life into a cold case. 

Certain traits from Hardy had begun to cultivate in her psyche. When she stirred her tea with a knife, she cursed under her breath and tossed the forsaken piece of cutlery into the sink. It clacked atonally. 

She turned a page of the document, the sound of the paper wafting into the symphony of the house.

Her phone made the distinctive noise of a text coming in, the screen lighting up. 

The same idiot who was also awake. 

She put the paper aside, smiling to herself, and texted him back. 

The roundabout went on for a few minutes. What are doing? Nothing. Are you looking at the case? I am. Why are you still up? Go to bed. And so forth. Alec knew she was seeing somebody, a new bloke in town with a strong jawline and good hair and respectable mannerisms. The kind of man who deserved Ellie, Alec had hinted to her. 

But here she was replicating the behavioral gesticulations of her boss. 

Once she turned off the lights and began the process of readying herself for bed, she found herself not thinking of her current suitor. Joe who she knew, or thought she had an approximation of, and this new man with his clean-cut shave and gentle eyes appeared so unlike the man who she had memorized and learned. 

She brushed her teeth in front of her bathroom mirror, her thoughts scattered and unorganized. She spat her toothpaste in the sink before she gazed at herself in the mirror, drawing her pajama top back slightly. Age and infirmity hadn’t been kind to her body; her breasts sagged, and her stomach drooped. She charted a silvery stretch mark with her fingertip. 

In bed, the red light of her alarm glaring menacingly at her, she wanted to think of this new man. His eyes bright and blue, his jaw sharp. 

Oh bugger. She muttered to herself, resigning to reality. Reality, she realized, her hand flat against her stomach, inching lower, hardly paved any way for logic and reason. She sighed, closed her eyes, and allowed her thoughts to drift toward Hardy. 

&

The world collapsed like a falling star and moved on. After Danny died and Joe was acquitted, Ellie saw Beth in the streets, the younger woman’s eyes roving over Ellie’s fragmented body like a tomb. Both were shells of those girls they once knew, now women on the cusp of another transitory experience. 

No one ever tells you what that next phase is. 

No one tells you much apart from their own illusionary experience. 

Gradually, Hardy settled into Alec, his suits expanded into jumpers, and a brightness enveloped the Miller home. Slight creases formed at Alec’s mouth, a gregariousness once more in Ellie’s step. She smiled and laughed again, and Tom asked her what was happening. 

She said she didn’t know. 

When Alec eventually kissed her, the act itself didn’t surprise her as much as when it happened. How long they had waited. How long they had both known. He pulled away, her eyes still shut, and he promptly apologized. 

So unlike those who came before him. 

He fumbled for words until she leaned forward, pressing herself against him, allowing him to feel the warmth generated from her body. 

The world collided at junctures. Abnormal viewpoints striking suddenly into harmony as though she had been waiting for this moment her entire life. 

She languidly wrapped her right arm about Alec’s neck, rubbing her left hand up and down his side. He reminded her of placid afternoons, of reassuring grey skies hovering over her. 

Alright? He asked, grinning at her. 

She nodded and returned his smile back to him. 


End file.
